At least three San Antonio higher-ed campuses are among the more than 8,000 colleges and universities nationwide grappling with cybersecurity breach of the classroom platform Canvas.
A hacking group has claimed responsibility for the breach, which took down the widely used system for several hours Thursday. The incident puts the personal data of millions of students and instructors at risk of exposure.
The UT-San Antonio and the University of the Incarnate Word issued statements confirming their Canvas users were affected, while Trinity University’s school newspaper, The Trinitonian, reported on a Canvas outage there.
In a statement to TheTXLoop-12, Alamo Colleges District confirmed they’re aware of the matter but didn’t say whether systems used its schools were affected.
UT-San Antonio officials’ statement said all assignments and exams due on or before this Friday, May 8, will be rescheduled for a “near future date.”
Meanwhile, UIW said deadlines for finals affected by the outage will be extended through May 15, while faculty’s grade deadlines are now pushed back to May 19.
Trinity’s IT department confirmed the breach via an email to students and faculty, according to the Trinitonian. However, the article made no mention of the school rejiggering deadlines.
Instructure, which provides Canvas to roughly half of all North American colleges and universities, confirmed Thursday on its website that its software had temporarily gone down, but said service had largely been restored.
In a letter shared earlier this week by the site Ransomware.live, hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for breaking into Instructure’s systems. Shiny Hunters said it accessed data from more than 275 million people on nearly 9,000 campuses.
ShinyHunters said it would leak an unspecified quantity of the data on May 12 if Instructure doesn’t reach out to meet its ransom demands. The hacking group didn’t specify how much money it’s seeking, however, it added that “several billions of private messages among students and teachers and students and other students [are] involved.”
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